![]() ![]() How far does Kipling understand, and thence describe, Anglo-Indian hybridization during the Imperial milieu? What remains of great interest within the focus of my essay, however, is the way Kipling describes this strained “hegemonic” relationship between the British imperialists and the natives from a new, and sometimes controversial, perspective. Although, Kipling the writer is always more prominent than Kipling the political man in the text and this is what makes Kim an intriguing novel. As such, Kipling admirably tells a story that has both political and literary merit. ![]() ![]() Thus, Kipling’s Kim, whilst being a tale of colonial power and native struggle, serves more as an extraordinary recognition of British imperialism at a specific moment in its history. This is because Kipling experienced a personal involvement with India, a far-away and unfamiliar world to many of his contemporaries. Rudyard Kipling felt the impact of the British Empire and the ‘Imperial Idea’ more tangibly than any other Victorian novelist, because Kipling’s imperialism is not completely synonymous with British imperialism. “Like all the great imperialists, Kipling was haunted by a sense of the mortality of the empire, so that one is forced to question how essential was empire to his larger philosophy?” As the title of this essay suggests, Kipling’s burden was synonymous with the ‘white man’s burden,’ which so far as culturally patronizing imperialists of Kipling’s era were concerned, a genuine burden. ![]()
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